viz.

Image Credit: Appidemia.com

Scrolling through the online list of startups launched this week at Disrupt SF, an annual technology conference hosted by TechCrunch, feels a bit like peering into the future the Web.  The catchy slogans and names of companies like Hop.in, Oogababy, and Okdo.it proclaim a new kind of Internet experience, one that is better, faster and more seamless than ever. The only caveat is that many of these startups will not get the chance to impact the Web.  Almost half of new businesses fail before they hit their five year mark.

Nevertheless, the roster of aspiring and early stage companies at Disrupt offers a snapshot of where entrepreneurs and app developers think the Internet is headed. Strangely, the success of YourMechanic--which won Disrupt's equivalent of the battle of the bands--suggests that the future may favor internet companies that are simply better than brick-and-mortars at providing access to basic services, like quality auto repair. Yet many of the startups featured at the conference don't bother with the real world at all. A sizeable number are devoted to allowing users to filter, personalize, or simply digest the seething contents of the ever-expanding Web.

Some of these aspiring businesses are strikingly abstract. Take for instance, Appidemia, a not-yet-live social-networking website for sharing and learning about--you guessed it--apps. If you're like me, you might wonder how this process works and how it could possibly be useful to anyone.  It seems the founders anticipated utter--excuse me--user confusion since they dedicated the entire background of their "coming soon" page to illustrating--in bizarre, childlike iconography--the platform's central concept.  The image below, which appears on the left side of Appidemia's site, seems to portray the mysterious processes of app creation, discovery and bundling, while the segment above (from the right side of the website) pertains to the sharing of said apps with the rest of the world.

Image Credit: Appidemia.com

There are many things to marvel at here: the extra-terrestial setting and its Candy Land-inspired trees, the oozing purple river (or is it an oil spill?), the app-showering hole in the sky, fuzzy cube creatures, and last but not least, the friendly pack of flying fish.  The combined effect of these variously endearing, alien, and ominous elements is ambiguous. It seems to hinge on how comfortable the viewer is picturing herself in an otherworldly, inhuman place, and how willing she is to imagine herself engaging--as a prospective user of the site--in the work of manufacturing and re-packaging digital things.  Comfort levels, and thus, the picture's appeal would seem to vary with the viewer's prior and/or simultaneous involvement in similar hyper-artificial web environments.

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about this image is that its purpose--to inform visitors of what the site does by literalizing its procedures--has the secondary, unintended effect of trivializing the whole enterprise of building, investing in, and subscribing to internet services whose sole function is to perpetuate further virtual experience.  I would argue that Appidemia undermines its own service, and other narrowly self-reinforcing web services, through a few highly literal aspects of its banner.  For one, the apps undergo a very slight change after passing through a giant robot machine; they get slapped together with a few other apps and tied up with a ribbon. So, essentially the site's functionality gets compared to that of a gift-wrapping station. Secondly, the viewer almost immediately transfers sympathy from the fuzzy dice characters to the pictured planet Earth. Not only do we prefer its inviting, serene appearance to the loud colors of the foreground's virtual landscape, but also, we worry that Earth is being assaulted with an app-loaded slingshot!  In the end, Appidemia comes off as a factory that doesn't make much, and I want to shout, "Watch out, Earth!  The Internet of the future is foisting on you all the apps you never knew you needed."